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Video Games Linked To Child Aggression
the4thdimension writes "CNN is running a story this morning that explains new research showing a correlation between video games and aggression in children. The study monitored groups of US and Japanese children, asking them to rate their violent behavior over a period of several months while they played video games in their free time. The study concludes that it has 'pretty good evidence' that there is a link between video games and childhood aggression." Stories like this make me want to smash things.
Video games are violent, per the majority. For most, the point of a game is to kill other people. I'm an avid game player of Xbox and Wii, and my four year old has his games that he plays (Simpsons, The Bee Movie game, Kung Fu Panda). Last year we noticed that when I was playing Zelda on the Wii, he loved to mimic my actions. He started collecting "swords" and "shields" out of anything at hand and would play fight. Every now and then we watched me play Lost Odyssey, where the characters run up to the mob, attack, and run back (and that's how he named the game - "the one where you run up and hit the bad guy and run back"). When I fought, he would orchestrate himself fighting our chair with a sword.
Even when the game is over and unplayed for months, he would still act out those movements. Is he aggressive? He's a child, and he does have aggressive tendencies like all other boys. The point of this article: can it be pinned on the games? I doubt it. Just as young boys are attracted to guns, army guys, and fighting, he is attracted to games that have him fighting people - even if it's just jumping on their heads.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, IMO.
Then again, I think there are many parents out there who expect their kids to be little adults. They want them to shut up, sit down, be quiet, and follow strict rules. And, when the kids act like kids, the parents stretch for something to blame for them being "unruly". When ritalin isn't helping, let's blame the video games. IMO
The results are consistent with my own experience. When my older son was younger, I provided him with access to an NES emulator so that he could play the old Nintendo games I had sitting in the closet. (I was missing cabling and didn't find them until later.) What we noticed is that if he was allowed to play video games for too long, he became a) lazy about doing anything else and b) very temperamental and difficult to deal with.
About that time my wife instituted a time-limit for games each day that my son could spend at any time during the day. when he wasn't playing games, he was required to find some other activity to do. (e.g. play with Duplos, ask to go to the park, etc.) This change was very effective in smoothing out his behavior.
The problem does not appear to be the violence in video games as Mr. Thompson, no longer esquire, would have you believe. The problem appears to be that playing games for a long period of time results in a lot of pent-up energy. That energy is tempered by a reduced desire to perform any task besides play video games. In result, the energy ends up expended via a behavior route.
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This is one of the stories that is good to throw out there if you want a quick bit of fame. It's easy research because it is kind of like a "duh" type of thing. You will feel more aggression psychologically, but that doesn't mean you are more likely to kill or hurt anyone.
While there is likely a link, it does not mean that playing violent video games means you kill people. Many will try to jump to this conclusion, many will fail.
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Could you clarify this distinction you make between the passive aggression of listening to pantera and active aggression that video games 'are'?
Does this mean passively watching violent movies is also passive aggression? And killing a mosquito is active aggression?
It sounds more like personal preference to me, clad in nice sounding terms.
It's been shown in many sound social psychological studies over decades that in children there is a strong correlation between watching violent tv and aggressive behavior, between playing violent video-games and aggressive behavior and between listening to aggressive music and aggressive behavior.
Go google (google scolar) yourself or look it up on wikipedia.
--There has never been any study proving a causal relationship between these (with behavior being the dependent factor) where the effect lasts for more than a few minutes. --
The catharsis theory ("I go to martial arts school so I don't have to be violent at home", "I listen to pantera once I'm at home so I can be more calm when I'm at work") is a Freudian theory disproved ages ago as well. I'm sure people can peruse the relevant social and personality psychology literature themselves on this. (journal of personality and social psychology, etc. )
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This is just good advice for kids in general. Give them warning about what is going to happen in the future. I have a 2.5 year old and a 1 year old. If you turn off the TV without telling the kid that it's going to get turned off, or if you just say, "we are leaving the park now", the kid will get cranky and wine. However if you tell them 10 minutes before hand, and remind them at 5 minutes and 2 minutes, you tend to get a much better reaction out of them.
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Agreed. I used to be surly, irritable and aggressive. Thankfully my parents are both teachers, so we'd go on 6 week long summer holidays in a caravan without a computer.
I remember being restless and agitated for the first couple of weeks of the holiday and then when the brain fog cleared I realised that computer games were doing something weird to my head. It wasn't necessarily about the level of violence in the games themselves, but maybe more something to do with the mental processes involved.
HAL.
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I have 5 kids, went through the age where they believed we could not touch them. During one heated argument, they said they would call the police. I said, tell you what, let me do it.
So I called our local police, and the office came in and told the kids what I could do and what I could not do. And they also said if I needed it, they would taze them a few times for me, so I would not get in trouble ...
Discipline problems went away after that.
I understand the need for clear, credible discpline and I want to be sympathetic to your point of view.
But I must say, every time -- every single time -- that I have seen a parent spank, public or private, the parent has been obviously emotionally agitated and acting out of anger. I'm not saying that these people don't have a right to raise their children the way they choose, and I'm sure there really are parents who spank thinking only of the child's needs (as opposed to the parent's need to express anger). The trouble is, as long as pro-spankers seem to be saying that spanking = good and more spanking = better, instead of discussing the merits of good spanking vs. bad spanking, it becomes more difficult to accept their arguments. Over time I think this erodes the credibility of corporeal punishment as a legitimate means of parenting.
I'm sure that all discpline must inflict pain of some sort (physical or otherwise), and so it's possible for almost any discpline tactic to be abusive if misused. However, humans are strongly wired to hit things when frustrated, and children should not be physical targets of frustration (with discpline as a mere excuse).
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Wow, that's insightful on slashdot? When we see a study that gabs a small number of children and shows demonstrative effects, we point as the pool or sample size and cry foul but when one individual somehow analyzes his own actions against what he thinks they would have been if he hadn't taken a certain action, well that settles it.
Where to begin?
One does not make a valid sample.
How do you know what you would have been like if you hadn't been listening to said violent music?
What makes you think this is short term reaction thing only? In other words, might you me more violent all the time as a result of your listening habits?
How do we know you self diagnosis is accurate?
How do we know you are telling the truth?
As usual it isn't the quality of the argument on slashdot that gets the mod-ups, it's hearing what we want. I wonder if we vote that way too.
Oh, this isn't a criticism of the original poster. I think I have made these arguments to when I was younger but I have come to realize that the world is a much bigger place made up of people very different from me. I have also come to realize my actions are not viewed by others as I view them myself.
I am a teacher and I often have students who have terrible behavior but my hands are tied, I am not allowed to punish them, yell at them or give them time outs because if I do and the children go to the parents and complain, then the parents start complaining to my boss that I am being the bad guy because "their kids would do nothing wrong, they are angels" and the boss tends to favor the parents because are the ones paying money and shit like that.
Parents love to blame the schools for whenever their kids pull shit because we are the ones who are supposed to "educate" them and teach them about life but when we do want to teach them some limits they come crashing down that we are harming their children. Well f*ck the parents, and the kids then.
Well in the real world, I think you're going to find that giving an accurate definition of stupidity is a very hard thing indeed. There isn't a single act or course of action that is always stupid, there isn't a single one that is always smart.
This goes into extremes : killing can be stupid, not killing can be even more stupid.
Working to your own advantage is, in reality, not something humans do. Instead they imitate others. Since the only ones you see in the street and around you are people that are actually alive, imitating them should be a good approximation to a tactic that keeps you alive. Natural selection will take care of "weeding" out the unwanted behaviors, and will do so very quickly at times. However during "economic growth" feedback will be much less, and many stupidities will become very popular indeed, for they are not (yet) weeded out. However, every last time, again and again, the time will come when growth slows, and stupidity is wiped out by nature.
Oh wait ... we've disabled and destroyed natural selection in humans (or rather the post WWII generation has). Well then extremely large numbers of people will start acting stupid (since most random courses of action are stupid, given no feedback, stupid courses of action will, by shear numbers, overwhelm intelligent ones).
Since people's behavior is merely a variation, perhaps a combination of other people's behavior, obviously violent video games cause violent responses in real situations, in fact that is a very direct consequence ("to give you an interesting life" so to speak, that "interesting" always seems to include violence is another indication). Even people who think they can separate games from reality (and they may very well pay lip service to that idea) will in practice be influenced into more violent courses of action.
And then you might say "but what about rational reactions of people ?". Well, they exist, obviously, but they are merely people imitating others. Responding rational is something that needs to be taught to children, it's not there "by default" (as any parent knows).
Another indication that this is the case is to compare just how good we are at imitating people versus how good we are at rational thought. We all know that every last human is an expert at imitation and that very few indeed are even moderately good at rational thought : It took humans about 20 centuries to realize that 1-1=0, and since then everyone considers the idea beyond trivial. It took another 5 centuries to realize that negative numbers are useful.
So how do we learn, really ? Well simple : any tought pattern, while copied by imitation, gets weeded out by nature if it is "too stupid", by decimating the population that is "too stupid". This, in reality, can be taken to be quite literally. Most religions, for example, including islam and just about every last natural religion were decimated when they failed to adapt to their surroundings. Examples that are completely extinct include the mayans, "real" islam (with the caliphate), incas, many african religions. It doesn't happen quite the way things seem to happen : the signs of an ideology dieing isn't a slow decrease in numbers, but rather violent shifts in numbers.
What you see when a religion or ideology is about to be destroyed is a really "unstable" number of adherents. It grows and falls in a few short years by literally millions upon millions. It becomes a "fashion" type of thing. One year there's a billion of them, 5 years later 10 million, another 10 years and there's 2 billion. And then, nobody really saw it coming, and it hits "zero" adherents, and doesn't recover. Oops ... bye (the same reason that e.g. huge rabbit populations have a habit of very, very suddenly dissapearing and appearing. Their numbers are very, very unstable. They enlarge too fast, thereby also shrinking too fast. At one point their numbers in an area hit 0, and they're gone, since after 0, there can be no more recovery*)
Slow, controlled,
I believe that Chris Rock said: Every child needs the 5 Key ass whoopings. Lying, cheating, stealing, cussing and disrespecting. You get those 5 and you turn out better.
I agree. There's a clear difference between disciplining one's kid and telling him he's a worthless good-for-nothing, and that he'd be better off dead. The former makes him a better person. The latter will turn him into a poor excuse of a human being, blaming everyone for each of his problems.
You're also hitting the nail on the head on #4 (well, that's a bit obvious with the tag "correlationisnotcausation"). If a kid has murderous intentions and wants to take revenge upon the world, he will get grand theft auto and start killing everyone on the game.
On the contrary, if a kid has a healthy psychological condition, he'll enjoy GTA, but because of the normal gaming elements.
I had a friend whose life was a mess, his father beat him, his mother abandoned him and the people he had to live with kept saying he was useless. His favorite videogames were GTA, Hitman 3, and other violent videogames - including Street Fighter, where I totally kicked his ass :P -. He often gets in streetfights, occasionally beats someone on the street because he felt like it, and one time he tried to commit suicide.
He went once with a psychologist and things have been improving for him, but he gets kicked out of jobs often (guess why). Are videogames the cause of his violent behavior? I don't think so.
But "abused and neglected kid becomes violent" isn't a headline as catchy as "kid who played GTA becomes violent".
Agreed.
Children need consistency. They'll push the boundaries, but it's especially then they need to know that you aren't budging. They should know what is going to happen to them when they do something. Instead, many parents let something go on unchecked and then explode with anger.
Parents should have certain offenses that get a spanking. For my children, its lying in order to get out of trouble. I always want the punishment for just owning up to a fault to be less than trying to lie and get out of trouble. In my mind, this reinforces the concept of personal accountability. If you mess up, own up to it. If you don't own up to it, then that's when things go really badly. After each time I spank them, I hug them and reassure them of my love. That's what usually makes them cry and feel bad for what they've done, and that's exactly what you want: remorse.
Not being perfect, I have spanked my children out of anger and will probably continue to do so at times. But I *always* regret that later. But as bad as that is, people always complement me on my well behaved children. I'd rather err on the side of giving them a bad spanking every once in a while (read: the exception and not the rule) than having children run amok.
I think you never see the proper use of spankings because that doesn't tend to happen in public. A parent has to be pretty angry to spank a child in public, and that's exactly when NOT to use a spanking. What you don't see are the good spankings administered in private.
blah blah blah
They did.
The violence has always been there. What is missing now is respect for authority. The respect was what kept a lid on the violence and kept it hidden. You used to have to isolate someone in a bathroom. Now you can just beat the shit out of them in the halls.
My son got suspended when a group ganged up on him. Non of the gang-bangers were punished. He said something they didn't like, so he was being 'disrespectful'. The lesson there was that it is ok to force your will on someone, as long as you can demonstrate that they did something you didn't like.
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Let's not confuse two kids fighting out an argument with systematic bullying. Many kids get beat up and the only lesson to be wiser on is "I shouldn't have looked at him" or "I should bring more money to give him next time". Most kids haven't been bred to stand up in a fist fight. Especially when many bullies have numbers on their side. I don't think I've ever seen a violent bully pick on someone when he was alone.
And I don't know why you brought up 9/11. The reason nobody did anything on the first planes is that historically you have a better chance at living if you let the hijackers go to where they want and get released at some point later rather than risk crashing the plane. That's why when the passengers of flight 93 learned what the hijackers' intentions were they DID fight back.
Anyway, to bring this back to school children escalating things to an unacceptable point I'll toss in a movie quote:
"They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue."
Unfortunately I don't think anything has done more to curb bullying in schools than Columbine.
That means you get to go beat up the gang right? I mean they were being disrespectful to you by beating up your son. Eye for an eye.
Seriously though, you did talk to an attorney over this right? I'd be running for school board to get the fuck of a principle fired.
I'm amazed that somehow it's OK to react with physical violence when someone says something you don't like. Free speech and all that. How that shit has become to universally tolerated is beyond me.
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I have no idea why it's like that. I was in school about 10 years ago, and the rules were made very clear. Every act of aggression is equal, including not only retaliation but self-defense, too.
If a bully attacks you with a bat you should take it. You won't be punished (except for being beaten with a bat). If you try to defend yourself both of you will be given equal punishments. Even if you get hit in the face but are able to push the person over and run like hell, that's somehow as bad as the initial attack.
I have no idea why people think crazy kids and school shootings are the result of videogames, and ignore the principals that order children to succumb to violent attacks because the authoritative figure said so.
..also, I would venture a guess that this may have something to do with the lack of respect for authority.
Did talk to an attorney. He told me that he could take my money if it would make me feel better, but nothing would change.
My son repeated something he heard from a black comedian. The principal was black. The gang-bangers were black. Ipso-facto, by the powers of politically-correct magic, physical violence was justified.
By my twisted logic, the BET channel is now banned in my house.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba